A fortress in Raric Bay that has stood for six centuries despite being built by a man who died before laying the first stone.
Tugon's Commission
Tugon var Seleth was a merchant prince of the Shacklands who made his fortune in the slave trade, lost it in a shipwreck, and spent his final years obsessed with Raric Bay. His journals, held in Gorath's restricted archives, document seventeen voyages into the bay between 187 and 203 AR, each one deeper, each one longer, each one leaving him more convinced that something beneath the water was trying to communicate with him.
He drowned in 203 AR during his eighteenth voyage. His body was recovered from the sixty-foot line, eyes open, facing southwest.
His will, notarized three days before his death, commissioned the construction of "a fortress at the heart of Raric Bay, built to specifications that will be delivered posthumously." The specifications arrived at his architect's door two weeks after the funeral, written in Tugon's hand, the ink still wet.
The architect built it anyway. He was found dead four years later, facing southwest, having completed his work.
The Structure
Tugon's Castle rises from a natural rock formation at the bay's center, directly above the deepest concentration of bones on the seafloor. The fortress is built from black stone quarried in the Myjornis Mountains, the same glassy material found in Yegnoth's walls, though no one has explained how Tugon knew where to find it or how his workers survived extracting it.
The castle's layout follows no military logic. Doors open onto walls. Staircases lead to ceilings. Windows face inward, toward lightless interior chambers. The great hall's floor is a mosaic depicting Raric Bay as seen from above, with the bone-field rendered in white tiles and something at the southwest edge that the artist left deliberately incomplete, a shape suggested by negative space, defined by what isn't there.
The basement levels descend below the waterline. The first three are flooded but accessible. The fourth is sealed by a door of the same black stone as the walls, with no handle, no hinges, no visible mechanism. The door is warm to the touch. It vibrates at a frequency felt in the teeth rather than heard.
No one has opened it. Several have tried. Their tools broke. Their magic failed. One mage attempted to teleport past it and arrived on the other side in pieces, not cut or torn but separated, as if the spaces between his atoms had been gently widened until he was no longer contiguous.
The Preservation
Tugon's Castle does not decay. Salt water has surrounded it for six centuries, and the mortar is as sound as the day it was laid. The black stone shows no wear. The wooden doors (there are three, inexplicably preserved) are solid and free of rot.
More notably: the castle does not attract the death that pervades Raric Bay. Fish swim past its walls and remain alive. Birds nest in its towers without dying. The three ships that sank in the bay all went down within a mile of the castle, but their crews did not reach its stone. The castle seems to exist in a bubble of normalcy, or perhaps a bubble of different abnormality.
Scholars from Nashua theorize that the castle is a lock. The thing beneath Raric Bay is a door. Tugon's Castle sits on top of it, and as long as the castle stands, the door stays shut.
What the thing on the other side might be, why the bones face toward something southwest, and how a dead merchant knew to build the lock before he died—these questions have no answers.
The Garrison
Gorath maintains a small presence in Tugon's Castle: four soldiers rotated every thirty days, tasked with preventing unauthorized entry and documenting any changes. The posting is considered punishment duty. Soldiers who serve it report no supernatural experiences, since the castle's bubble seems to protect them, but they universally describe a sense of pressure, as if something vast is leaning against the walls from below.
One guard, in a report that was meant to be routine, wrote: "The door in the basement is louder tonight. I think it's learning to speak."
He was reassigned to desk duty. He faced southwest when he slept for the rest of his life.
The Specifications
Tugon's posthumous instructions for the castle's construction have never been fully released. What's known: they were written in a language that doesn't match any known tongue, yet the architect understood them perfectly. They included mathematical formulae that, when examined by Nashua's theorists, described geometries that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space. They specified the black stone by name: vothrakalin, "the bones of refusal."
The final page of the specifications was blank except for a single sentence in common trade tongue: "When it wakes, this will not be enough. Build more."
No one knows what Tugon meant. No more castles have been built.